Australian Review of Applied Linguistics - Volume 38, Issue 1, 2015

There is growing evidence that social interactions at work with local colleagues present a real challenge for Chinese immigrants to Australia (e.g. Tomazin, 2009; Zhou, Windsor, Coyer, & Theobald, 2010), often leaving them feeling defeated and despairing, and the Australians puzzled or affronted. Seeking to understand the nature, origin, and dynamics of the problem at its sociocultural depth, a study was undertaken to examine the problematic social experience as reported by a group of Chinese immigrant professionals, from both their own and their Australian counterparts’ perspectives. The findings suggest small talk presents professionally qualified Chinese with an acute problem, and this is because the nature and dynamics of small talk are new in their social experience. Taking a sociolinguistic perspective to analyse data comprising Chinese accounts and discussions of problematic incidents and Australian commentary on these, the root of the difficulty has been revealed to lie in mismatches in the deeply held beliefs and values of Chinese and Australians about the nature of personal identity and interpersonal relationships, most pertinently, differences in their belief about how relationships beyond the intimate circle should be best managed. The article will present the findings of the study and the implications they suggest.

Given the potential influence of teachers’ linguistic practice on children’s language use and gender role development, the present study seeks to examine the extent of linguistic discrimination present in teachers’ language. A total of 215 Chinese EFL teachers were invited to participate in the survey, which included a series of elicitation tests on their selection of English words for occupational titles, and the choice of generic pronouns anaphoric to people of unknown gender. The findings revealed that, while gender-biased language is still widely used, non-sexist linguistic reform has had an impact on Chinese EFL teachers, some of whom have expressed a concern with regard to avoiding sexist language. The study also found that choice of generic pronouns co-varied with such factors as semantic meaning, word structure and the gender stereotypes associated with particular occupations.

Despite an increased emphasis on form-focused instruction (FFI), the use of the computer as a grammar tutor has remained largelyunexamined for nearly two decades. With new technologies at hand, there is a need to take a fresh look at online grammar tutors andlink designs more strongly to contemporary second language acquisition (SLA) principles and the concept of a teaching presence. Theaim of this study, therefore, is to investigate the potential of using a purpose-built digital video series as a virtual grammartutor. To achieve this aim, we used a pre-test, post-test, and delayed post-test to evaluate the impact of a purpose-built grammar video on 62 EFL university students. The results of the study demonstrate that purpose-built video has strong potential for use as a virtual grammar tutor. Consequently, it may be possible to improve the state of Tutorial CALL from a drill-based approach to one that is more substantive through the development of a series of step-based video tutorials that tutor, allow for the practice of and evaluate second language (L2) grammar skills.

This article presents the results of a study examining the effectiveness of written corrective feedback (CF) on the simple past tense and the impact beliefs may have on students’ uptake of the feedback they receive. A seven-week study was carried out with 42 advanced EFL learners in Vientiane, Laos. Students’ beliefs about written CF were first collected, after which they were assigned to either the control group or to groups that received written CF according to their feedback preferences. Students produced four pieces of writing (pre-test, post-test and two delayed post-tests) that responded to four different narrative prompts. The targeted grammatical feature was the simple past tense. The study found that the three feedback groups showed significant improvement in the use of the targeted feature while the control group did not. Furthermore, the results seemed to indicate that beliefs might have impacted on the extent to which the Lao students improved their linguistic accuracy because the students who received their preferred type of feedback were more successful at eliminating the targeted errors than the ones who did not.